Running the Gauntlet

If there was any morning to be off the streets in Louisville, Kentucky, it was a Saturday in early May, as downpours flooded the streets and drenched pedestrians to the skin. Yet storms didn’t stop a hundred or so abortion opponents from gathering as early as 6 a.m. to celebrate Mother’s Day, one day early, outside of EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the only abortion provider in western Kentucky and southern Indiana.

Forty Catholic “prayer warriors,” as they described themselves, lined the block along the right-hand side of the clinic, holding up umbrellas while they prayed the rosary and sang hymns. Students from a local Bible college, holding graphic posters of aborted fetuses, lined up on the sidewalk to the left of the clinic entrance, where they could be closer to the front window and the drop-off zone for patients entering the building. The entrywayitself was a platform for variety of others: sidewalk preachers giving sermons on sin, murder and the lies told in abortion clinics; self-styled anti-abortion “counselors” pleading for patients to turn back before they harm themselves and their babies; and escorts trying to help patients through the clinic’s doors.

What’s happening in front EMW Women’s Surgical Center represents perhaps the worst harassment of abortion providers across the country. For clinics in states or cities that have buffer or bubble zone ordinances—about 40 states have no statewide ordinances protecting clinics—patients have more freedom to enter a clinic unencumbered. That is not the case in Louisville, where the clinic is perched in the center of a business district, lacking any of the protections that come from private parking or fencing around the premises. In that situation, public sidewalks become a fearsome gauntlet—crowded with crosses, pictures of the Virgin Mary, signs about murder or Jesus’s love and the massive graphic images becoming more commonplace every day. Add in the bodies of the escorts in orange vests, and the yellow-vested abortion opponents known as Speak for the Unborn racing them to reach the patients first, and the sidewalk becomes a scrum of noises, signs and people.

In McCullen v. Coakley, the Massachusetts buffer-zone case currently before the Supreme Court, which will be decided by the end of June, lawyers for abortion protesters have tried to portray their clients as “plump grandmothers” wanting to quietly hand out pamphlets. “What these people want to do is to speak quietly and in a friendly manner, not in a hostile manner, because that would frustrate their purpose, with the people going into the clinic,” Justice Antonin Scalia said during questioning, echoing the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

In McCullen, defendants of the state’s 35-foot buffer surrounding a clinic entrance say that the zone allows anti-abortion activists ample room to express their right to protest abortion as well as attempt to influence patients, without being directly in front of the clinic doors where they may become a barrier to their ability to access the building and an abortion. The plaintiffs, on the other hand, argue that the zone violates their freedom of speech and makes it impossible for their “sidewalk counselors” to approach patients, offer literature about abortion alternatives or otherwise try to persuade them out of terminating a pregnancy.

What Scalia’s argument doesn’t acknowledge is that the civility of those encounters is largely dependent on laws ensuring buffer zones themselves. In September 2013, the National Abortion Federation or NAF,the professional association of abortion providers in the United States, reportedthat 92 percent of providers in areas without buffer zones said they were concerned about the safety of their workers and their patients in the areas directly surrounding the clinic; 90 percent reported that they had patients themselves express concern about their own safety when they entered a clinic; and 80 percent stated that they had at some point had to call law enforcement because of a safety or criminal concerns from an anti-abortion presence at the clinic.

“It’s pretty clear that there are real problems outside clinics across our country,” Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of NAF, told me. “This is not ‘sidewalk counseling’ that is taking place outside these clinics. … Patients have been physically assaulted, have had to endure threats and hate speech—things that they shouldn’t have to endure in order to obtain medical care.”

So the court’s upcoming decision will be pivotal. Those clinics that already have buffers are likely to see challenges mounted against their own laws, while others that are already experiencing issues with protesters may find more gathering on their own sidewalks if the court decides that freedom of speech trumps the ability to access a clinic’s front doors unhindered. In other words, if the court follows Scalia’s logic, the Louisville circus could soon be coming to a clinic near you.